@inproceedings{regev-etal-2025-time,
    title = "The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context",
    author = "Regev, Tamar I  and
      Ohams, Chiebuka  and
      Xie, Shaylee  and
      Wolf, Lukas  and
      Fedorenko, Evelina  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Wilcox, Ethan  and
      Pimentel, Tiago",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.1471/",
    pages = "30476--30488",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody{---}the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry distinct information? Prior work has shown that the information carried by prosodic features is substantially redundant with that carried by the surrounding words. Here, we systematically examine the time scale of this relationship, studying how it varies with the length of past and future contexts. We find that a word{'}s prosodic features require an extended past context (3-8 words across different features) to be reliably predicted. Given that long-scale contextual information decays in memory, prosody may facilitate communication by adding information that is locally unique. We also find that a word{'}s prosodic features show some redundancy with future words, but only with a short scale of 1-2 words, consistent with reports of incremental short-term planning in language production. Thus, prosody may facilitate communication by helping listeners predict upcoming material. In tandem, our results highlight potentially distinct roles that prosody plays in facilitating integration of words into past contexts and in helping predict upcoming words."
}